SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS

When a major vendor introduces a major new technology, it is normally an interesting event. It is the subject of much scrutiny in the media. Many analysts and reporters examine it for accuracy, fit to current business models, competitive fit to the marketplace , and so on. With every major new technology, decisions and opinions —whether good or bad—are always shaped.

What is particularly interesting is when the majority of major vendors introduce the same technology—albeit with different names and terminology. This has to be significant for IT senior management, CIOs, and the IT industry in general. Vendors are increasingly becoming customer-centric—providing real world solution solutions to meet the needs of the customers. This is the fundamental approach for autonomic computing, providing solutions that have real and definable business value, reducing costs and complexity, and providing self-management systems.

NOTE

1. Remarks made in IBM document, http://www.research.ibm.com/autonomic/research/papers/AC_Vision_Computer_Jan_2003.pdf.

Chapter 15. THE TIVOLI MANAGEMENT SUITE—AUTONOMIC FEATURES

INTRODUCTION

To gain a better understanding of the autonomic features of the Tivoli Management Suite, you'll need some background information. IBM's Tivoli software suite consists of an underlying infrastructure containing a growing set of Tivoli and third-party management software applications that can utilize this framework to manage heterogeneous systems and applications in a consistent manner. Tivoli provides a standardized management interface to different operating systems and services. This allows administrators to manage users, systems, databases, networks, and applications from one interface and provides a streamlined way to automate and delegate routine time-consuming tasks .

A corporate IT infrastructure contains a large number of resources to manage. These resources can be network components , operating systems, databases, Web servers, Intranets, middleware, and off-the-shelf or custom applications. The foundation of the Tivoli Enterprise architecture is distributed object-oriented software called Tivoli Framework . Most of the applications of the Tivoli Enterprise suite use the services included in the framework. This means that when a major function in the framework is improved, these Tivoli applications can take advantage of the improvement. The Tivoli Framework also serves as a single point of integration for Tivoli and third-party applications. In addition to the framework, Tivoli Enterprise provides a suite of management products in the disciplines of deployment, availability, operations, and security management. These are often called the fundamental Tivoli management applications or the Tivoli core applications.

Tivoli provides software products in four distinct areas, namely:

1. Security — Providing access to the right resources at the right time.

2. Configuration and operations — Managing the change and complexity of your e-business infrastructure.

3. Performance and availability — Monitoring and optimizing the performance of your e-business infrastructure.

4. Storage management — Protecting and maximizing the integrity and availability of all business data.

The scope of systems management is wide- ranging and covers many product lines within IBM and third-party vendors . Figure 15.1 illustrates this coverage of the IBM portfolio of products and services.

When autonomic computing is integrated with Tivoli software products it provides solutions that:

• Increase responsiveness through provisioning by creating self-configuring systems.

• Ensure better business continuance with availability management through self-healing systems.

• Increase service delivery using workload management solutions that create self-optimizing systems.

• Protect corporate information and resources with security management solutions that foster self-protecting systems.

Now let us review the autonomic features—self-configuring, self-healing, self-optimizing, and self-protecting—of Tivoli in more detail.